Generally, packaged application vendors in the domain of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are getting more involved in “business process oriented software and services offerings”. From the point of view of the business enterprises that use these ERP packages, a Business Process Hierarchy (BPH) provides an organized view of their IT (information technology) applications and components, to then offer a conceptual bridge between their business and IT.
Most business enterprises that use commercially available ERP packages have undertaken numerous customizations with respect to older versions of their packaged applications. In scenarios such as system consolidation or upgrade, it is often desired to organize these customizations, or custom objects, in accordance with a BPH, and then use the resulting organized information to size, plan and implement the consolidation or upgrade.
Generally, organizing custom objects into a BPH is not a trivial task, and practitioners expend a significant degree of manual effort in organizing custom objects using the BPH. Such manual effort tends to present undesirable inefficiencies that tend to defeat the purpose of the objective nature of the associated structures.